When the banshees of the past come calling in Jez Butterworth’s fearsome The Ferryman, you can bet their shrieking will be blood curdling. Directed by Sam Mendes (Skyfall) and opening tonight on Broadway at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, the Olivier-award-winning play is a stunner, stitching familiar elements of Irish pastoral drama, The Troubles history and Butterworth’s magical, myth-tapping touches into something as powerful as anything on today’s stage.

If nothing else – and, believe me, there is much, much else – The Ferryman cements the playwright’s status as an unrivaled ending-writer, as this tale of a sprawling Irish family reckoning with decades, even centuries, of violence and division spirals to a conclusion that recalls, in its own way, those earth-pounding, theater-shaking footsteps of unseen Giants that closed Butterworth’s transcendent Jerusalem in 2009.

Not that you’ll want to rush a moment of the three hours and 15 minutes...